Scaling sucks

Scaling an application or an organization generally involves exchanging developer productivity for scale. Here are some ideas about how to make those tradeoffs less painful.

Transcript

1. Scaling Sucks (What I learned in a year about 9 months at Etsy) @rafeco Rafe Colburn Friday, October 5, 12
2. What’s Etsy • “Ebay for twee people” – The Brooklyn Paper • That place where you buy handmade stuff • “A tool to help people create small businesses.” (me) Friday, October 5, 12
3. We’ve already passed the 2011 total in 2012 Friday, October 5, 12
4. August 2012 Numbers • 3.8 million items sold • 2.4 million new listings • 1.42 billion page views Friday, October 5, 12
5. Friday, October 5, 12
6. (What I learned in a year about 9 months at Etsy) Continuous deployment Friday, October 5, 12
7. Graph everything Friday, October 5, 12
8. Branching in code $server_config['foo'] = array( 'enabled' => array( 'blue_background' => 20, 'orange_background' => 20, 'pink_background' => 20, ), ); Friday, October 5, 12
9. Etsy is not cloud- based We’re on the LAMP stack Friday, October 5, 12
10. What I’ve learned at Etsy Friday, October 5, 12
11. Scaling sucks (But there are ways to mitigate the suckage) Friday, October 5, 12
12. Your code will be rewritten, just not all at once Friday, October 5, 12
13. You’ll use all of the databases Friday, October 5, 12
14. Data plumbing is a black hole Friday, October 5, 12
15. There is a place for heretical views on services Friday, October 5, 12
16. We define production service broadly Friday, October 5, 12
17. The “Why Wasn’t I Consulted” list Security, ops, analytics, internal apps, international ... Friday, October 5, 12
18. Procrastination is OK (sometimes) Friday, October 5, 12
19. The trap: scaling is an interesting problem Friday, October 5, 12
20. Programming is to so!ware engineering as sex is to safe sex Friday, October 5, 12
21. Continuous deployment cures a lot of ills (If you can make it work.) Friday, October 5, 12
22. Scaling the organization is the toughest challenge Friday, October 5, 12
23. “Naturalistic programming” Friday, October 5, 12
24. Thank you! @rafeco Friday, October 5, 12